Month: December 2001

The following article, concerning a key Memphis-related event in the life of the late Joseph Durick, bishop of the Diocese of Tennessee in the ‘60s and ‘70s, is excerpted from a longer article. The passage is about Durick’s involvement in events surrounding the fateful Memphis sanitation strike of 1968.)

Now and again one of my old comrades, a veteran of the civil rights wars, will recall saying to Joe Durick: “Hey, Bishop, when is the Church gonna make you a cardinal and send you off to Rome?”

“Not me,” the Bishop would say with that open, toothy smile of his, “No, for me it’s from Nashville straight to purgatory.”

Well, I don’t believe it turned out that way. I bet when the grim reaper did come in the middle of the night to the bedside of a sleeping Bishop Joseph A. Durick, the ticket in the old reaper’s hand read: “To Heaven, non-stop.”

The Durick story unfolds as an allegory, an instructive fable. This tale lends itself to the telling now because an important new book, Blessed Are the Peacemakers by Historian S. Jonathan Bass, opens up an important segment in Durick’s life and work. Here I will tell you about some other segments in that extraordinary life, segments hushed up until now.

Bass’ book makes us realize how the life of Roman Catholic Joe Durick and others became intertwined with that of Protestant Martin Luther King Jr. The result in Tennessee was profound. Durick became, as the Bishop of the Diocese of Tennessee, the first head of a predominantly white, statewide organization to wage war against racism using religious and moral, as opposed to political, ammunition. Moving the conflict to the religious plain significantly changed, for all time, the nature of the battle.

The spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. seemed to hang in the air over everything that happened in those days, hang in the air like the lingering bars of a concerto. Indeed, it was events surrounding Dr. King’s death that led to my own association with Bishop Durick. I was the Memphis Commercial Appeal’s lead reporter covering the strike by the city’s garbage men. Scalding criticism had been heaped upon Durick when he had donated a thousand dollars from his discretionary funds to help feed the families of the strikers.

King had come to Memphis to support this strike when he was killed. In fact, the cab in which I was riding had just pulled out of the driveway of the Lorraine Motel on April 4, 1968, when James Earl Ray’s finger pulled the trigger of a high powered rifle and sent a bullet slamming into the throat of King, who had been standing on the motel balcony.

A short time later, with King lying on an emergency room gurney at St. Joseph Hospital a scant four blocks away, I took up residence in the office of Memphis Mayor Henry Loeb. I would sleep on a couch there as the city came under martial law, and I would be there two days later when Durick, who had flown from Nashville, came in with a group of some 20 black and white ministers for a face-to-face confrontation with Mayor Loeb.

In the next few days, Durick led a memorial Mass for King and participated in a memorial march through the streets of Memphis. Durick and I came to know each other during these events and two months later he talked me into moving to Nashville to become the first lay editor in the 44-year history of the statewide diocesan newspaper, The Tennessee Register. Although not a priest, I was given a license to raise hell.

“You will have a free hand,” Durick told me, “Just make this newspaper an instrument for change, and for justice. Use it as a tool for Christian charity. And try not to get me in too much trouble.”

He only gave me one piece of journalistic advise: “You don’t have to be restricted to the ‘left end is a Catholic’ excuse. That means that the only way the editor of a Catholic publication can write about anything is to find a Catholic angle. An editor wants to write about a certain football team so he claims, ‘My reason for writing about it is that the left end is a Catholic.’”

Whatever tinges of regret the bishop may have had later about giving me such free rein, he never once in the ensuing years stopped me from printing, or rebuked me for printing, any material. And we ran some things that set Catholic–and perhaps a few non-Catholic–teeth on edge by the thousands.

Preparing for this story, I flipped back through some of the old, bound issues of the Tennessee Register. Here is a sampling of a few headlines:

“Latin American Bishops Urged: Reaffirm Violent Revolution”
_”Two Prominent Men Leave the Priesthood”
_”Church May Clear ‘Heretic’ Galileo”
_”Pope Receives Mrs. King, Bishop Honors Husband”
_”Bishop Marches To Honor Martin Luther King”
_”Pope Compares King’s Death, Christ’s Passion”
_”Priest Defends Black Panthers”

This is just a tiny sampling. The Register took up the lance of the social Gospel week upon week for years. And each week the goal was the same, inform the readers about developments in the Church, but also never, ever cease to drive that lance home and prod the conscience of Tennesseans to stand up for the oppressed and the victims of injustice.

We ran a story about the Pope reaffirming the long-held opposition to artificial birth control. But we ran along side it a story on 140 theologians saying that Catholics may follow their conscience on birth control matters. We ran a cartoon praising the Pope’s encyclical on birth control alongside another cartoon ridiculing the same encyclical.

To go along with a story questioning popular conceptions of Christ, we ran on the front page a quarter-page wanted poster for “Jesus of Nazareth: Vagrant. Loiters around synagogues, has ‘hippie’ appearance, often seen without shoes. Associates with common working people and the unemployed. . . Anarchist–subject is a professional agitator wanted for sedition and conspiring to overthrow the established government.”

The amazing thing is not that I got away with ruffling so many feathers. The amazing thing is that this bishop publisher allowed me to get away with it, sometimes even stuck his fingers in and ruffled a few feathers himself.

In June of 1969 we reported in the Register that a survey of 1,769 Tennessee Catholics showed that a plurality said the Church: (1) should feel obliged to take a stand on moral issues, (2) begin to dissolve the parochial school system, (3) allow priests to marry, and (4) give weighty consideration to modifying the ban on birth control. Only three percent of all polled felt that nothing controversial or sensational should be reported.

Well, if that three percent was accurate, it was a very loud three percent. In keeping with his new commitment to open dialogue, Bishop Durick, as publisher, had announced that the paper would begin printing letters. This allowed Durick’s critics to have a field day.

They wrote calling Durick and other liberal bishops “jackasses” and “buffoons” among other things. “We don’t have a bishop,” wrote one lady, “ we have a politician, a publicity seeker.” A few brave souls wrote letters of praise. We printed them all, praise and criticism alike.

There were, as well, some witty, supportive letters. When we printed an article by Father John McMurry defending those who decide to change their vocation, protesting letters flooded in, many of them touting a view of the Church as never changing. John Seigenthaler responded with his own letter, reading in part: “With so much to be done today and tomorrow it is sad to see so many looking for historical precedents to try to validate irrelevancy. . . It is quite true that God isn’t dead. But He must be embarrassed by so many well-meaning people who claim to speak for Him.”

The question of just who speaks for God was tested to the max in an ugly episode that came to be hearlded as “The Nashville bishop versus the Memphis Nun.”

Memphis was a hotbed_no, a cauldron_of anti-Durick sentiment. Nothing caused that cauldron to spill its molten anger more than Durick’s stance when a union went on strike in 1969 against St. Joseph Hospital, an institution in downtown Memphis run by Catholic nuns. Durick kept pointing out that Catholic social teaching upholds the right of workers to unionize. He took the position that Sister M. Rita, the administrator of the hospital, and the union_the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees–must sit down and negotiate in good faith.

It’s the irony of ironies that the workers on strike at the hospital belonged to the same union that Dr. King was trying to help when he was killed, and that St. Joseph was the very hospital where doctors tried in vain to save his life. It’s also worth noting that the striking workers were virtually all poor blacks, while the board members that controlled the hospital were all rich whites.

During the strike, five ministers, including one priest, were arrested during a demonstration at the hospital on behalf of the union. One of those arrested was

the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, who had succeeded King as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. During the 1969 Christmas holidays, I flew to Memphis with Durick to visit these ministers in jail.

When we encountered Abernathy in a large holding cell at the Shelby County Jail, he was shirtless. Due to the oppressive heat in the jail, little streams of perspiration ran down the black minister’s chest and back, dripped from his elbows. As we came in, Abernathy jumped up from the steel table on which he was sitting and he and Durick fell into a warm embrace. Both were stocky and barrel chested. They reminded me of two pro linemen congratulating each other after a football game.

“This is my bishop!” Baptist Abernathy yelled out as he squeezed Durick harder, “Yes, praise the Lord, my bishop. My bishop.”

“God bless you,” Durick said. “And Merry Christmas.”

When they finally parted, I could see that Durick’s coat had blotted Abernathy dry.

Eventually the strike was settled, but thousands of Memphians never forgave Durick for, as one put it, “turning his back on his own people, on his Church’s own hospital, and on the good nuns.” For his part, Durick privately was just as glad when Memphis_or “Big M,” as he referred to it–eventually became the seat of a separate diocese and he could wash his hands of Big M.

The following article, concerning a key Memphis-related event in the life of the late Joseph Durick, bishop of the Diocese of Tennessee in the ‘60s and ‘70s, is excerpted from a longer article. The passage is about Durick’s involvement in events surrounding the fateful Memphis sanitation strike of 1968.)

Now and again one of my old comrades, a veteran of the civil rights wars, will recall saying to Joe Durick: “Hey, Bishop, when is the Church gonna make you a cardinal and send you off to Rome?”

“Not me,” the Bishop would say with that open, toothy smile of his, “No, for me it’s from Nashville straight to purgatory.”

Well, I don’t believe it turned out that way. I bet when the grim reaper did come in the middle of the night to the bedside of a sleeping Bishop Joseph A. Durick, the ticket in the old reaper’s hand read: “To Heaven, non-stop.”

The Durick story unfolds as an allegory, an instructive fable. This tale lends itself to the telling now because an important new book, Blessed Are the Peacemakers by Historian S. Jonathan Bass, opens up an important segment in Durick’s life and work. Here I will tell you about some other segments in that extraordinary life, segments hushed up until now.

Bass’ book makes us realize how the life of Roman Catholic Joe Durick and others became intertwined with that of Protestant Martin Luther King Jr. The result in Tennessee was profound. Durick became, as the Bishop of the Diocese of Tennessee, the first head of a predominantly white, statewide organization to wage war against racism using religious and moral, as opposed to political, ammunition. Moving the conflict to the religious plain significantly changed, for all time, the nature of the battle.

The spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. seemed to hang in the air over everything that happened in those days, hang in the air like the lingering bars of a concerto. Indeed, it was events surrounding Dr. King’s death that led to my own association with Bishop Durick. I was the Memphis Commercial Appeal’s lead reporter covering the strike by the city’s garbage men. Scalding criticism had been heaped upon Durick when he had donated a thousand dollars from his discretionary funds to help feed the families of the strikers.

King had come to Memphis to support this strike when he was killed. In fact, the cab in which I was riding had just pulled out of the driveway of the Lorraine Motel on April 4, 1968, when James Earl Ray’s finger pulled the trigger of a high powered rifle and sent a bullet slamming into the throat of King, who had been standing on the motel balcony.

A short time later, with King lying on an emergency room gurney at St. Joseph Hospital a scant four blocks away, I took up residence in the office of Memphis Mayor Henry Loeb. I would sleep on a couch there as the city came under martial law, and I would be there two days later when Durick, who had flown from Nashville, came in with a group of some 20 black and white ministers for a face-to-face confrontation with Mayor Loeb.

In the next few days, Durick led a memorial Mass for King and participated in a memorial march through the streets of Memphis. Durick and I came to know each other during these events and two months later he talked me into moving to Nashville to become the first lay editor in the 44-year history of the statewide diocesan newspaper, The Tennessee Register. Although not a priest, I was given a license to raise hell.

“You will have a free hand,” Durick told me, “Just make this newspaper an instrument for change, and for justice. Use it as a tool for Christian charity. And try not to get me in too much trouble.”

He only gave me one piece of journalistic advise: “You don’t have to be restricted to the ‘left end is a Catholic’ excuse. That means that the only way the editor of a Catholic publication can write about anything is to find a Catholic angle. An editor wants to write about a certain football team so he claims, ‘My reason for writing about it is that the left end is a Catholic.’”

Whatever tinges of regret the bishop may have had later about giving me such free rein, he never once in the ensuing years stopped me from printing, or rebuked me for printing, any material. And we ran some things that set Catholic–and perhaps a few non-Catholic–teeth on edge by the thousands.

Preparing for this story, I flipped back through some of the old, bound issues of the Tennessee Register. Here is a sampling of a few headlines:

“Latin American Bishops Urged: Reaffirm Violent Revolution”
_”Two Prominent Men Leave the Priesthood”
_”Church May Clear ‘Heretic’ Galileo”
_”Pope Receives Mrs. King, Bishop Honors Husband”
_”Bishop Marches To Honor Martin Luther King”
_”Pope Compares King’s Death, Christ’s Passion”
_”Priest Defends Black Panthers”

This is just a tiny sampling. The Register took up the lance of the social Gospel week upon week for years. And each week the goal was the same, inform the readers about developments in the Church, but also never, ever cease to drive that lance home and prod the conscience of Tennesseans to stand up for the oppressed and the victims of injustice.

We ran a story about the Pope reaffirming the long-held opposition to artificial birth control. But we ran along side it a story on 140 theologians saying that Catholics may follow their conscience on birth control matters. We ran a cartoon praising the Pope’s encyclical on birth control alongside another cartoon ridiculing the same encyclical.

To go along with a story questioning popular conceptions of Christ, we ran on the front page a quarter-page wanted poster for “Jesus of Nazareth: Vagrant. Loiters around synagogues, has ‘hippie’ appearance, often seen without shoes. Associates with common working people and the unemployed. . . Anarchist–subject is a professional agitator wanted for sedition and conspiring to overthrow the established government.”

The amazing thing is not that I got away with ruffling so many feathers. The amazing thing is that this bishop publisher allowed me to get away with it, sometimes even stuck his fingers in and ruffled a few feathers himself.

In June of 1969 we reported in the Register that a survey of 1,769 Tennessee Catholics showed that a plurality said the Church: (1) should feel obliged to take a stand on moral issues, (2) begin to dissolve the parochial school system, (3) allow priests to marry, and (4) give weighty consideration to modifying the ban on birth control. Only three percent of all polled felt that nothing controversial or sensational should be reported.

Well, if that three percent was accurate, it was a very loud three percent. In keeping with his new commitment to open dialogue, Bishop Durick, as publisher, had announced that the paper would begin printing letters. This allowed Durick’s critics to have a field day.

They wrote calling Durick and other liberal bishops “jackasses” and “buffoons” among other things. “We don’t have a bishop,” wrote one lady, “ we have a politician, a publicity seeker.” A few brave souls wrote letters of praise. We printed them all, praise and criticism alike.

There were, as well, some witty, supportive letters. When we printed an article by Father John McMurry defending those who decide to change their vocation, protesting letters flooded in, many of them touting a view of the Church as never changing. John Seigenthaler responded with his own letter, reading in part: “With so much to be done today and tomorrow it is sad to see so many looking for historical precedents to try to validate irrelevancy. . . It is quite true that God isn’t dead. But He must be embarrassed by so many well-meaning people who claim to speak for Him.”

The question of just who speaks for God was tested to the max in an ugly episode that came to be hearlded as “The Nashville bishop versus the Memphis Nun.”

Memphis was a hotbed_no, a cauldron_of anti-Durick sentiment. Nothing caused that cauldron to spill its molten anger more than Durick’s stance when a union went on strike in 1969 against St. Joseph Hospital, an institution in downtown Memphis run by Catholic nuns. Durick kept pointing out that Catholic social teaching upholds the right of workers to unionize. He took the position that Sister M. Rita, the administrator of the hospital, and the union_the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees–must sit down and negotiate in good faith.

It’s the irony of ironies that the workers on strike at the hospital belonged to the same union that Dr. King was trying to help when he was killed, and that St. Joseph was the very hospital where doctors tried in vain to save his life. It’s also worth noting that the striking workers were virtually all poor blacks, while the board members that controlled the hospital were all rich whites.

During the strike, five ministers, including one priest, were arrested during a demonstration at the hospital on behalf of the union. One of those arrested was

the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, who had succeeded King as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. During the 1969 Christmas holidays, I flew to Memphis with Durick to visit these ministers in jail.

When we encountered Abernathy in a large holding cell at the Shelby County Jail, he was shirtless. Due to the oppressive heat in the jail, little streams of perspiration ran down the black minister’s chest and back, dripped from his elbows. As we came in, Abernathy jumped up from the steel table on which he was sitting and he and Durick fell into a warm embrace. Both were stocky and barrel chested. They reminded me of two pro linemen congratulating each other after a football game.

“This is my bishop!” Baptist Abernathy yelled out as he squeezed Durick harder, “Yes, praise the Lord, my bishop. My bishop.”

“God bless you,” Durick said. “And Merry Christmas.”

When they finally parted, I could see that Durick’s coat had blotted Abernathy dry.

Eventually the strike was settled, but thousands of Memphians never forgave Durick for, as one put it, “turning his back on his own people, on his Church’s own hospital, and on the good nuns.” For his part, Durick privately was just as glad when Memphis_or “Big M,” as he referred to it–eventually became the seat of a separate diocese and he could wash his hands of Big M.

Anti-warriors offer nothing but nay

A recent MSNBC poll says 87% of Americans support the military action against terrorism currently being waged in Afghanistan. That’s a huge majority, to be sure, but it begs the question, who are these 37,131,356 dissenters and why haven’t their alternative plans to save the world from both terrorism and war been released? Could it be there are no alternative plans?

There is nothing un-American about protest or dissent. Ever since the first resident of Jamestown muttered to his fellow colonists, “Perfect. Captain John Smith gets Pocahontas and I get dysentery” this land has thrived on debate and the freedoms to air views contrary to government policy are what makes this nation great. But opposition without proposition in a time of war is irresponsible. And opposition without proposition is exactly what we are hearing from the “enlightened” minority who seem to feel flag waving equates to knuckle dragging and the ignorant masses who are supporting the war have got it all wrong.

There seem to be two distinct camps of naysayers in the current Anti-war movement. The “Give Peace a Chancers” and the “Moral Equivalancers”. Neither group is completely wrong in their suppositions but their conclusions are, ultimately, inconclusive.

The “Give Peace a Chancers'” chant is that war is not the answer. Apparently, no answer is the answer and those who committed the atrocities of September 11 should be shown love and not guns. Admittedly, their assertions are somewhat more complicated than that but definitely no less murky and ineffectual.

“If you can see [the terrorists] as a relative who’s dangerously sick and we have to give them medicine, and the medicine is love and compassion.” (Actor Richard Gere)

But is overly simplistic to be against the fighting because war is “evil”. Might not war, under some circumstances, be a necessary evil?

Wars in the last century killed 19 million civilians. Genocide, tyranny, and man-made famine killed 127 million. 6 to 1? I’ll take those odds, any day.

Now, as the conductors of genocide, tyranny and man-made famine do not, as a general rule, stop their genocidal, tyrannical and mass famine-producing behavior until forced to do so (by military opposition, for instance), then perhaps the greatest tool for the preservation of human life and liberty in the last century was the war.

The anti-Gulf War saying was, we all remember,É “No Blood for Oil.” Overly simple, yes, but there was a cogent point behind that phrase. The anti-Terror war folks haven’t been able to garner much backing with their bumper sticker- “No blood for the massacre of thousands and promises from the enemy to kill every American man, woman, and child.” Kinda hard to get behind that sort of mantra.

The Give Peace a Chancers feel that negotiating with our enemies will lead to mutual understanding. But the negotiating leverage between two parties is significantly debilitated when one party swears to God he will kill the other. For example, say what you want about the formation of Israel (research the Hagannah, Irgun and Stern Gang- chilling stuff) but when the PLO promised to drive the Jews into the sea, the Government in Tel Aviv became much less inclined to offer concessions. “Ah, Chairman Arafat, if you will compromise and promise to only drive us into the low-tide surf, we will agree to pull our forces out of the West Bank.”

Similarly, Bin Laden is not offering us much wiggle room when he tells us his ultimate goal is that we die. Still, some Americans want to seek common ground, basically, because the U.S.A. is not perfect either. Granted we are not, but are we really better off dead?

That is the basic precept of the Moral Equivalancers, who believe the misdeeds of the United States, both past and present, preclude us from passing judgement on those who mean to do us harm. True, the United States is guilty as sin for certain things in it’s past. (Though certainly not 1/10th of what Oliver Stone would have you believe). But sacrificing all of our lives as a way to do penance seems a bit much.

Less like true believers, and more like irresolute bandwagoners, the Equivalancers have an affirming catch phrase of their own. “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” True enough, but mightn’t one man be dead wrong? Some of us are able to discern a difference between the World Trade Center attacks and, say, the Boston Tea Party. Any parallels drawn between Paul Revere and Mohammed Atta are patently absurd and show a complete lack of objectivity in the part of the Equivalencer.

The current anti-Globalization movement around the world today falls into this category. The tenet of their philosophy relative to the current fighting says that U.S. and Western corporate exploitation of less advanced nations has created a festering wound of disadvantaged and angry masses that can easily be tapped into by terrorists cells. This characterization of the roots of the current problem is utterly wrong and smells of expediency by the anti-globalists. The spring of hate from which the present batch of terrorists has been drawn comes from perverted fundamentalist teachings in cloistered religious schools. These young men are not studying macroeconomic theory and then coming to the conclusion that U.S. companies are not paying a competitive wage and therefore the terrorists are justified in killing innocent civilians. No, they are being, in effect, brainwashed by a disciplined indoctrination into Islamic Fundamentalism that promises paradise for those who die in the Jihad.

The anti-war movement says they do not want us to fight. But what, exactly, do they want? Do they want us to die?

No. The fact is, they want the U.S. Government to ignore them and insodoing protect them from danger- all the while appearing enlightened and above such pedestrian pursuits as patriotism and realpolitik by damning the actions carried out on their behalf to save them from evil.

These difficult times require difficult choices. As step 1 of the war (Afghanistan) evolves into discussion of who to step on in step 2, the denunciations against U.S. Foreign policy may well increase and that, in itself, is not a bad thing. But being against something without being for something else is completely ineffectual, unless one’s only goal is to appear progressive, tolerant, or open-minded, at the expense of real and healthy debate. Such self-serving behavior is an American trait that America can now ill afford.

War, by definition, is the ultimate zero sum game. A winner creates a loser. And in this war, the loser’s loss is absolute. If someone knows a viable alternative to war, they should exercise their right and responsibility to be a part of the process and air their opinion. If not, then they should quietly appreciate their tax dollars at work- keeping others from killing them.

(Mark Greaney handles international transactions at Memphis-based Sofamor Danek)